Vault Solutions

Collaboration is a key component in business success, and in order to operate seamlessly, many businesses turn to Microsoft Office 365, a collection of Microsoft hosted applications. For Veritas Enterprise VaultTM customers, this most often means utilizing Exchange Online for their email, making it necessary to migrate their Enterprise Vault on-premises mailboxes archives.

In order to make this move as smooth as possible, there are several things to know and factors to consider, as outlined in a recently released Veritas White Paper. We thought it would be helpful to talk about a few aspects of a migration like this that are critically important: • Preparing to migrate and migrating • Disabling Mailbox Archiving • Journal vs SMTP archiving, and • Archive searching post migration

First, one must consider the current Enterprise Vault environment before migrating to Office 365: • Is Enterprise Vault Exchange Journal archiving enabled? • Is Enterprise Vault Mailbox Archiving for Exchange enabled? • Are there mailboxes already migrated to Office 365? • Are there mailboxes yet to be migrated to Office 365?

One of the first things to understand is that out of the box, Enterprise Vault functionalities are restricted when a mailbox is migrated from Exchange on-premises to Exchange Online. However, with some planning and the use of additional products, your migration can be smooth and efficient, and users can have unimpeded access to all their email.

For example, Mailbox synchronization is not applicable for migrated mailboxes, requiring that mailbox synchronization is run before migrating to ensure any policy changes are applied to the mailboxes. It is possible to migrate the mailboxes with short-cuts intact if you use a product such as Archive Accelerator Restore which can replace the short-cuts with the original items post migration.

So, the process is typically:

1. Update the mailbox policy to disable mailbox archiving 2. Update the Enterprise Vault desktop policy to disable functions such as Store and Restore 3. Run provisioning to apply the new policies (this must be done before the mailboxes are migrated, since Enterprise Vault won’t be able to provision the mailboxes once in Office 365.) 4. Migrate the mailboxes. Note, the user will still have short-cuts, but these short-cuts will continue to work. 5. Optionally use Archive Accelerator Restore to replace the short-cuts with the original items. (if you don’t do this step, you may need to keep the Enterprise Vault mailbox archives in place) 6. Optionally use Archive Accelerator Restore to migrate the messages that didn’t have mailbox short-cuts. Some companies don’t care about items which the user didn’t have short-cuts for. Others do this step but place these items in the users Online Archiving in Office 365 if they have that feature. Another option is to have these messages put into a subfolder in the user’s mail mailbox.

An alternative way to migrate the mailbox archives to Office 365 is to use Enterprise Vault (either the supplied PowerShell command Export-EVArchive, or the Export wizard) to export the archived items for each mailbox archive into a .PST file and then import them to Office 365.

If you have been using Journal archiving, you also need to consider how you will do that going forward. In Office 365 it is not possible to journal data to a Journal mailbox located in Office 365. Read this article from Microsoft about journaling in Exchange Online. Take note of this paragraph that makes it clear that you can’t use an Exchange Online mailbox as a journaling mailbox:

“You can’t designate an Exchange Online mailbox as a journaling mailbox. You can deliver journal reports to an on-premises archiving system or a third-party archiving service. If you’re running an Exchange hybrid deployment with your mailboxes split between on-premises servers and Exchange Online, you can designate an on-premises mailbox as the journaling mailbox for your Exchange Online and on-premises mailboxes.”

So, the alternatives are:

1. Keep an on-premises Exchange server to Journal to 2. Use the more efficient SMTP archiving feature of Enterprise Vault (this is the recommended course, as it reduces the size of you archives and increased the rate at which Enterprise Vault can archive messages. It also eliminates the need for an on-premises Exchange Server. 3. Don’t archive data at all from Office 365, but rather rely on the built-in capabilities of the Office 365 eDiscovery and Compliance features. While some companies do this, we find that most stick with Enterprise Vault for Compliance and eDiscovery needs. This is especially the case for financial institutions who typically insist on keeping a separate copy of the data, often on WORM storage.

Regardless of how you archive your journals, many customers want to give the ability to search archives to their end users. To achieve this goal, our product, Archive Accelerator Enterprise Search, allows the end user to directly and securely search their archived emails contained in SMTP or journal archives. This activity is restricted to only those messages they have sent or received. It allows users to view all their messages, even those that have been deleted from their mailbox. It also provides a way for users with the correct permissions to view another users email.

It is true that some Enterprise Vault functionality is restricted after migrating on-premise Exchange mailboxes to Office 365, but it doesn’t have to be that way. Short-cuts can be restored, end users can search ALL their email from one easy-to-use location, and email can still be journaled.

In summary, make sure you prepare before migrating so you can avoid some of the pitfalls that have complicated other companys’ migrations.

Introducing the Catalogue

Imagine walking into an enormous library looking for a book on a particular subject, maybe even a specific book. Where do you start? There are floors upon floors of shelves filled with more books than you can fathom, so you don’t want to wander around aimlessly. You’d be lost for days! Instead, you go to the card catalogue – most likely online. The catalogue doesn’t have the content of each book, but rather the metadata of the books to help you find just the one(s) you’re looking for, including the title, publication info, subject, location, etc.

As the amount of unstructured data continues to grow at an incredible rate, the ability to find data in vast repositories such as Veritas Enterprise Vault becomes more challenging. IDG believes unstructured data is growing at the rate of 62% per year, and that by 2022, 93% of all data will be unstructured.* At Vault Solutions, we have been building products for over a decade that help deal with this data, and recently we’ve release an important new innovation.

Our team has developed a new feature in our flagship Archive Accelerator product which allows organizations to do certain searches in seconds instead of minutes. We call it the Catalogue. Using the Catalogue, we can do a query across an entire Enterprise Vault environment which would normally have taken hundreds of searches using the built in Enterprise Vault search engine. This is not a replacement for Enterprise Vault Search, but a way to take the strain off the Enterprise Vault indexes for certain classes of inquiries, such as finding all messages sent to/from an individual (custodian).

Examples of queries that can be done with the catalogue:

Find all emails sent from anyone to a particular vendor

Find all emails sent to/from an individual (e.g. custodian)

Find all emails sent to/from a department

Find all emails sent between two dates to/from an individual

Find all files archived from a particular location

Scalability

This Catalogue is designed to handle billions of emails and can itemize all messages even in environments with multiple Enterprise Vault servers.

Currently, the Catalogue has been incorporated in our Archive Accelerator Enterprise Search application and is automatically used in many searches that can be accomplished without a full text index. Doing so makes some of the searches go over 10 times faster than before.

We’ve also tested using the Catalogue to place legal holds on data in Enterprise Vault and have shown we can do this more than 50 times faster than using Discovery Accelerator. Of course, Discovery Accelerator should still be used when the legal holds involve searching the content of messages.

While the Catalogue is an enormous benefit for many applications, it is not a replacement for the indispensable Enterprise Vault indexes, or for Discovery Accelerator. It doesn’t index the contents of messages or attachments, for example, only the metadata.

Comparing Enterprise Vault indexes with the Catalogue

When searching Enterprise Vault, there are hundreds of indexes to search through, filled with both email content AND metadata. Part of the speed and efficiency of the Catalogue is that there is only one.

So, for any organizations needing a way to quickly search through terabytes of email archived with Enterprise Vault, or a dramatically more efficient way to routinely put email on legal hold for given custodians, the Catalogue can provide be a huge advantage.

Over the course of these past ten years, we’ve had five different office spaces. Each of the four moves were to accommodate our growth. This last move, although just down the hall, brought us into a space that is twice as large as our last office. It is awesome!

We have a fantastic team comprised of former Digital Equipment Corporation employees, former Enterprise Vault customers, a gentleman who moved up from the south to join us, and even someone who knocked on our door asking for an internship as a Software Engineer. He’s now with us full-time! We’re all right here in Portsmouth, NH – engineering, QA, support – all of us. It’s relatively unusual today for a software company to have the entire team local and we love it!

As we look back, we asked a few members of our team to share what comes to mind when they think about Vault Solutions.

Dave Ouellette, President and Co-Founder:When starting a company from scratch, it is impossible to imagine where you’ll be 10 years into it. We certainly didn’t imagine that we’d have developed such a great team that has enabled us to build such great products, which has attracted such a fantastic list of partners and customers world-wide. We’ve laid a solid foundation for the next 10 years of growth, and we’re looking forward to it.

Preston Butler, Senior Technical Support Representative:I moved to Portsmouth (Winter Wonderland) from Atlanta, Georgia to work for Vault Solutions in October 2013. I never thought I’d move to this part of the country because of the cold temperatures.

Since joining Vault Solutions, I’ve learned how to use tools that aid in the investigation of Exchange and Outlook issues, network troubleshooting, and database connectivity. I keep growing and learning as we grow.

I enjoy working technical support because I love the satisfaction that comes from helping other people with whatever issues they might have. It’s rewarding.

Joe Famularo, Director of Technical Support and Services:When I think back over the years, I reflect on how much our customer base has grown and how we’ve grown to provide the products and services they require.

My favorite memories are those where we’ve won big accounts and have had successful engagements. The times when our customers have asked for our assistance, we did the best to help them out, and then we hear them say ‘thank you.’

Every day is an ‘all hands on deck’ day. You do what has to be done. Over time, the smallest leak can cause a ship to sink, so it is at times, my job to plug that leak (or clean the coffee machine).

Jeremy Ouellette, Lead Software Engineer:10 years ago our server room was a 2×3 foot crawl space under the basement stairs, next to where the engineers were crammed. The “server room” door was left open of course, to prevent overheating of the server (if not the engineers), and it was loud. Today, our office sports a dedicated server room complete with its own HVAC system, a full server rack, state-of-art networking, and a pile of parts bigger than our old crawl space could ever hope to cram in. The engineers have more room too! Here’s to another decade of growth!

We’re honored to have been part of your data archiving solutions for the past ten years, and look forward to the next ten and beyond!

Meet Jeremy, Vault Solutions Co-Founder and Lead Software Engineer. He’s been with the company since it was started in December of 2006. “Holy Moly!,” he says… “Has it really been a decade?” See what makes Jeremy tick in this edition of Meet the Team!

What brought you to Vault Solutions?So one night in 2006, I was visiting my parents, probably watching Lost, and my dad exclaims, “Why don’t we start our own company?” No one had a good answer!

At the time I was working as PM Logic, my own little software consulting gig. Most of PM Logic’s work actually came from him, though. So, without even knowing it, PM Logic was a sort of “proof of concept” for Vault Solutions. The beta!

What do you love about what you do every day?There’s nothing more satisfying than wracking my brain for a solution, translating the solution into code, then hitting a switch and watching it all work. It can feel like magic, like casting a spell, and it’s fantastic. Sometimes I even do a little victory dance after!

What do you do when you’re not at the office?Last night I talked philosophy and watched Star Trek with my girlfriend – the perfect night IMHO.

Also I also love astronomy, hiking, gaming, coffee with friends… and wow, that sounds just like my online dating profile. Which I can take down now, by the way!

What’s a fun fact that most people don’t know about you?Every chair I sit in for more than 20 minutes a day – my office chair, home office chair, couch, the driver’s seat of my car – has Yoda and/or Darth Vader somewhere in view. Usually both.

What else would you want people to know about you and what your unique contributions to the team are?Naturally, working in a team with deadlines and support calls and more deadlines and more support calls, it can get stressful for all of us! So sometimes I’ll try to loosen it up with some random humor. Completely random and off the hook – or even hardcore, if I’m running on Redbull. Either way it’s straight to the dome, so we can laugh and take a breather… then back to work!

What else should we know, Jeremy?The company wouldn’t be a success without the whole team: engineers, testers, support, my mother, father, brother. Everyone has put so much work into it, and I really love working with them. May we all continue to live long and prosper!

Do you ever wonder if you were in a particular place at a certain time for a very specific reason? Learn what brought our Software Development Manager/QA Manager, Michael Witherspoon, to our team!

How long have you been with Vault Solutions?I have been here just under a year. I started on June 1st, 2015 as the Software Development Manager and now I’m the QA Manager, too. Given my extensive design and development experience, I also contribute to application design and architecture, I do pre-QA testing on most of our code, I write documentation, and even do support calls as needed.

What brought you to Vault Solutions?Serendipity brought me to Vault Solutions. One early Saturday evening over Memorial Day weekend last year, a strong gut feeling told me to go into a local bar and music venue in Portsmouth. It was very unusual for me to go into this particular establishment but I went anyway. There I met the founder and CEO of Vault Solutions. Through that discussion we moved to a job interview two days later. I was hired a few days after that and began work within a week. Fate, luck, divine intervention? I don’t know but I’m here and am very happy about it.

What do you love about what you do every day? Favorite part of your work? Why?Making and executing plans that come together. Motivating, organizing, and inspiring a group of people to reach a common goal has always been my favorite part of any job. At this job I get to do all of that with an interesting mix of smart, good-hearted people with varied technical backgrounds.

What do you do when you’re not at the office?When I’m not working I enjoy my acoustic guitar, building things out of wood, hanging out with my friends and my newest pursuit: yoga. I also enjoy sailing, crossword puzzles and competing in Scrabble tournaments.

What’s a fun fact that most people don’t know about you?A few years back I took a year-long sabbatical during which I lived in a 19-foot Class-B motorhome I call The Dodge Mahal and I earned my living counting cards playing blackjack in casinos all over the country. It was mentally challenging and fun, like when I was an Apache helicopter pilot in the Army, but it wasn’t a sustainable, long-term lifestyle for me.

What else would you want people to know about you and what your unique contributions to the team are?Whenever issues come up involving Lotus Notes / Domino, web application development, or Java / J2EE, I’m the ‘go-to’ guy. Other than that, I try to pick the best people for the job and I try to stay out of their way while they do their work.

Next up in our “Meet the Team” series is a name that many in our Vault Solutions extended family will recognize – Tyler Reed.

How long have you been with Vault Solutions?I’ve been with Vault since July of last year (2015).

What role(s) do you play on the team?I’m the Sales Manager, and the general all-around handy man in the office.

What brought you to Vault Solutions?For me, coming to Vault Solutions was a great opportunity for growth, and the challenge of something new.

What do you do when you’re not at the office?I’m always outside. Even in the winter. Love getting my hands dirty. My hands constantly ache and will never look the same. I get them so beat up, I must update my fingerprint scanner with my ’new prints’ every couple months.

What’s a fun fact that most people don’t know about you?I hate seafood. As a Mainer it’s unheard-of. I often pretend I’m allergic to make things easier.

What else would you want people to know about you and what your unique contributions to the team are?I love to teach and motivate. It’s a passion of mine to see someone’s face light up, feeling good about something new they’ve learned – whether it be about an interest or something new they’ve learned about themselves.

What is something that not many people outside of your close circle know about you?I’m currently working with my husband and our friends to start a self sustainable tiny house community in Maine. An “ECOmmunity” if you will.